The James Logan Courier

By Billy O'Keefe
McClatchy-Tribune (MCT)

Before it was cool to love "Deadly Premonition," "Earth Defense Force 2017" was everyone's ironically adored game of choice — a low-budget, sloppily assembled but wholly lovable Japanese third-person shooter that took bad graphics, terrifying voice acting, comically stiff controls and jerky animation and mixed in a too-ambitious-for-its-own-good scope and some dead simple but absolutely chaotic shootouts to create one inexplicably great time.

With "Earth Defense Force: Insect Armageddon," we have the third-person shooter equivalent of a cherished unsigned band putting out its major-label debut. An American developer has wrestled away the reins, and it's clear a bigger budget was in play during development. "Armageddon's" control tweaks — both on foot and in vehicles — are a night-and-day improvement over "2017," and while the visual presentation remains behind the curve, it's considerably more stable and much better equipped to handle the action when everything is collapsing and exploding.

By David Lightman and Lesley Clark
McClatchy Newspapers (MCT)

WASHINGTON — Congress and President Barack Obama beat the deadline for raising the nation's debt ceiling by just a few hours Tuesday, but they hardly ended the clash over the size and reach of government. The next confrontation promises to be at least as contentious as the one they just finished.

Congressional leaders have two weeks to name members of a special 12-member legislative panel that's assigned under the debt-limit law Obama signed Tuesday to find ways to cut the government's budget deficit by as much as $1.5 trillion by Nov. 23. That number can be reached by reductions in spending and increases in revenues, and the brawl over how to do that already has begun.

From wikipedia
Irving Babbitt (August 2, 1865 – July 15, 1933) was an American academic and literary critic, noted for his founding role in a movement that became known as the New Humanism, a significant influence on literary discussion and conservative thought in the period between 1910 to 1930. He was a cultural critic in the tradition of Matthew Arnold, and a consistent opponent of romanticism, as represented by the writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Politically he can, without serious distortion, be called a follower of Aristotle and Edmund Burke. He was an advocate of classical humanism but also offered an ecumenical defense of religion. His humanism implied a broad knowledge of various moral and religious traditions.


Visit the Irving Babbitt Project at the National Humanities Institute website.